05-15-2012, 11:08 PM
There are probably no surviving records where Roman soldiers "talk" as most histories are written by elite writers. We are, therefore, left with Hollywood depictions of Roman soldiers speaking in Elizabethean venaculars. Author Richard Miles in his history, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, quotes 2d century BCE playwrite Plautus' play, The Little Carthaginian, and repeats the lines of a Roman soldier who confronts someone he thinks is messing with his woman:
"What's this twosing? What's this twinsing?
Who's the chap with the long tunics like a tavern boy?
Eh? Is my eyesight failing? Is that my girl Atherastilis?
It is! It certainly is! I've felt for a long time that she was making light of me!
Isn't the wench ashamed to be petting a porter in the middle of a street?
By Lord, I'll give him to the hangman this instant for torture from top to toe!
They're nothing but a set of ladykillers, these dangle-tunics.
But I'm certainly going to get after this African amorosa.
Hi, you! I mean you, woman! Have you no shame?
And you! What is your business with that wench?
Answer me!"
"What's this twosing? What's this twinsing?
Who's the chap with the long tunics like a tavern boy?
Eh? Is my eyesight failing? Is that my girl Atherastilis?
It is! It certainly is! I've felt for a long time that she was making light of me!
Isn't the wench ashamed to be petting a porter in the middle of a street?
By Lord, I'll give him to the hangman this instant for torture from top to toe!
They're nothing but a set of ladykillers, these dangle-tunics.
But I'm certainly going to get after this African amorosa.
Hi, you! I mean you, woman! Have you no shame?
And you! What is your business with that wench?
Answer me!"
"In war as in loving, you must always keep shoving." George S. Patton, Jr.